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Sludge In Flask Gives Clues To Origin of Life
sciencehabit writes "In the 1950s, scientist Stanley Miller conducted a series of experiments in which he zapped gas-filled flasks with electricity. The most famous of these, published in 1952, showed that such a process could give rise to amino acids, the building blocks of proteins. But a later experiment, conducted in 1958, sat on the shelf--never analyzed by Miller. Now, scientists have gone back and analyzed the sludge at the bottom of this flask and found even more amino acids than before--and better evidence that lightning and volcanic gasses may have helped create life on Earth."
Didn't he leave a Twinkie sitting on the shelf too? (And scientists found fewer amino acids than ever before!)
I was going to say "How do they know there was no contamination?", but TFA states that equal amounts of right handed and left handed organic molecules were found, ruling out contamination as a source of the amino acids.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
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But how is it that lightning formed amino acids found they're way deep among the deep ocean floor, and in large enough quantities for life to have formed and survive?
Two words: shit sinks
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
It took hundreds of millions of years and a lab the size of a planet to do it the first time. It may take more than a few decades to reproduce that.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
If examining sludge in a 50-year old flask can give clues to the origin of life, just imagine what scientists could learn by examining the inside of my fridge!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
In the fifties, when these experiments was set in motion, it had just recently been proven that DNA was the mechanism by which cells passed on their programming to their offspring. Prior to that, the common belief was that proteins did all the work, and that DNA was just a structural fibre like cellulose. Today, we're strongly of the opinion that not only was protein less relevant to early life, but probably completely irrelevant, as we've determined that RNA can perform the role of both DNA (information storage) and proteins (enzymes and structure). Evidence suggests that it once performed both of these roles exclusively, and that DNA and proteins evolved because they were tools better-suited to certain tasks.
THEREFORE: the availability of amino acids isn't relevant to the origin of life; only that they're around later for higher life forms to evolve. We really need to worry about the availability of ribonucleotides. The idea that we need to worry about the availability of amino acids only comes later.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
Change your rant. Replace 'anyone who believes in a creator God' with 'any creationist' and your rant is 100% true.
Except the babble after because...
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
If you notice, he never said his religious friends. He said his creationist friends. Which can safely be assumed to fall into the raving lunatic bucket you describe.
$_ = "wftedskaebjgdpjgidbsmnjgcdwatb"; tr/a-z/oh, turtleneck Phrase Jar!/; print
Yes, because as we all know, anyone who believes in a creator God is a backwards moron who hates science.
If they take their religion literally, I give them much respect. They are still wrong but at least they are true to their beliefs.
Today's 'religious' people very conveniently ignore the parts of religion they find distasteful or outright horrifying. Those people I do not give any respect towards their beliefs. If you want the 'good' parts you have to take the bad parts.
Religion is entirely a human creation - to explain the (at the time) unexplainable and to provide the ability to live 'nicely' with your neighbor. Every single religion on the planet has the same basic tenets; be nice, be honest, be good. That could be a sign of a 'creator' or it could just as easily be evidence of the same human desires manifesting themselves in very similar ways in disparate circumstances. In which case their 'creator' was 'necessity' the mother of invention.
Science is continually expanding our knowledge. What about religion? It is only clinging to the as yet unprovable factoids. It is introducing no new evidence to the record. Hell science is introducing proof of pieces of the biblical fables. Not of their true meaning but that they at least happened. I find that both infinitely fascinating and ironic.
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
1. Lightning zaps a volcano
2. Wait X [m/b]illion years
3. ...
4. Profit
And yet the creationists are the ones with fairy tales? [does not compute]
Until and unless scientists can create actual life forms in a sterile clean-room from periodic table elements, life on this planet and exactly how it got here remains quite a bit more myserious than some would have you believe despite our best efforts to understand it.
Personally the part that confounds me is that DNA is highly organized information. Assuming a starting point of a planet with no life forms and no pre-existing DNA to bootstrap the process, its formation seems like negentropy in an otherwise entropic Universe. Evolution doesn't seem to have a real answer to this question other than throwing large amounts of time at the problem. Creationism merely relocates the problem; one could ask if God created all of this then what are God's origins, or if there was never a time when God did not exist how does one even begin to comprehend that or really understand what that means? Panspermia of course has the same flaw; if Earth got its life from a visiting comet/asteriod then where did that get living organisms?
Any way you look at it, the very fact that we're here to have this discussion is incredibly mysterious. I don't share the urge some have to dismiss or gloss over that fact. I actually find it a beautiful thing to celebrate, not a nuisance to be explained away.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
to explain the (at the time) unexplainable and to provide the ability to live 'nicely' with your neighbor
What part of the new testament tries to explain the origin of rain again, or states that the point is to live well with your neighbor? I seem to remember Jesus specifically going after those who placed too much emphasis on personal righteousness and rebuking them-- to the point where they desired his death.
The problem with today's armchair religious historians is that they make assertions such as these which fly in the face reality.
The real problem with any religious activity is that it's a drain on human energy. There's no value in attempting to prove which particular set of fairy tales is true.
There are several classes of creationists, but when used in such an obviously insulting way it may be assumed to refer to the young-earth creationists. The old-earth creationists have less of an obvious conflict because their claims are in general nonfalsifyable no matter what the evidence, while the young-earthers have to distort the evidence like a bonsai kitten to fit their claims.
Ahhhh my teen years. No there can be intelligent people who believe in God. But they just haven't spent enough time thinking about all of that to realize that such a God is a complete and utter asshole who you better errr... pray, doesn't actually exist.
Think about it. He's all powerful. He's all caring. He creates a universe with deterministic laws which will undoubtedly create a very specific result... and we're the best he could do?
Any engineer who isn't a raving lunatic could sketch the basic design for a new species you want evolved which isn't subject to so much pain and suffering in about 3 minutes.
If we're the product of a divine plan set to unfold over billions of years than God is a callous asshole without any ethics.
Furthermore if you assume that God used science (and a deterministic universe) to create us that we have no free will. Without free will we all are behaving exactly as programmed and once again God is responsible for all of our actions. Which means when Hitler exterminated the Jews... God. When the Tsunami washed across Japan... God. Etc...
Every creationist regardless of religious orientation depends on a logical fallacy to advance their beliefs. Which is essentially a form of lunacy as the OP advanced.
As soon as you reject occum's razor and introduce non-empirical shenanigans every theory is subject to the Spaghetti Monster/Last Tuesday fallacies.
There are plenty of repeats of this - they just don't bother publishing them because there isn't much new to learn.
In fact, we repeated a version of the Urey-Miller experiment in my undergraduate biology lab independent project. The hard pard was going around bumming free equipment (high voltage transformer from the EE dept, balloons of elementary gases from the chemistry dept, even the help of a very cool tech in the physics dept who helped us make a simple spark gap chamber out of a glass bottle, a couple tungsten rods, and a blowtorch).
The goal was to repeat a few times with slightly different starting materials, and see what different amino acids we could find. Unfortunately, we managed to blow up the custom made spark bottle on the second run; someone dropped it and caused a hairline crack after the first run, and that let enough oxygen get in after we (not-so-successfully) evacuated it to cause a nice little explosion after turning on the spark gap. Luckily we were careful enough to put it under an enclosed fume hood ;)
In the end it was more an exersice in begging for supplies than novel science. But that was probably a lot more useful skill to learn for a budding researcher than how to inseminate a sea urchin...
That could really put a spin on things. Evolution ~ Creationism. Humm...
No amount of evidence would convince creationists that they're wrong.
As the saying goes, you can't use reason to leverage someone out of an opinion that wasn't acquired by reason.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Disclaimer: i was a student under one of Miller's former post-docs. That doesn't mean I know much more than you.
From my understanding, the problems to be solved had to do with the misconception that organic molecules could only be made "organically." It was well known that life makes amino acids, fats, etc.; however, it was also well known that such things were done by the action of enzymes or other structures within living cells. So the question was more of a "how do we break the chicken-and-egg paradox?" instead of "can we reverse engineer exactly how life was created".
The fact that you could start off with inorganic materials and make organic building blocks without a living system processing them was the ground shaking breakthrough. Once you had that, then it's easy to conjecture that enough organic molecules would eventually build up that some of them would become self-organizing (and eventually resemble life). If some other technique was discovered to make organic molecules from inorganic, then the key missing link would still have been satisfied.
Assuming a starting point of a planet with no life forms and no pre-existing DNA to bootstrap the process, its formation seems like negentropy in an otherwise entropic Universe.
Earth is not a closed system - it receives constant input of energy from the Sun. Therefore there is no contradiction in formation of more highly organized chemicals (and eventually life), so long as the process is driven by that external energy. The "primordial soup" theory is compatible with that.
We still don't have a complete explanation of how things went there, of course. Some prominent theories hold that something akin to "evolution" actually started before DNA was in place (with RNA, or possibly even earlier), and DNA is the result of that evolution. But the "mystery" there is largely due to our inability to conclusively prove that things happened one way or another, and not due to some missing links or somesuch.
Until and unless scientists can create actual life forms in a sterile clean-room from periodic table elements, life on this planet and exactly how it got here remains quite a bit more myserious than some would have you believe despite our best efforts to understand it.
A scientist believes the theory with the most scientific support, while still experimenting. It is not scientific or rational to look at a theory, see it is not 100% explained, and thus decide to believe an alternate hypothesis with no scientific support.
Assuming a starting point of a planet with no life forms and no pre-existing DNA to bootstrap the process, its formation seems like negentropy in an otherwise entropic Universe.
I take it you failed thermodynamics? The second law applies to closed systems and overall entropy, not localized entropy within a system. We can't even definitively define the universe as a closed system and you think you can assess the overall entropy in the system?
Any way you look at it, the very fact that we're here to have this discussion is incredibly mysterious.
Everything is very mysterious until you investigate. The scientific method is the best tool we have for such investigation. As a scientist I disagree with your characterization. By the same token you could claim gravity is very mysterious and thereby imply it is not really be happening. The only qualitative difference is that people understand the theory of gravity better than the theory of abiogenesis.
That isn't what creationist means, in the context being used. It's short-hand for "young earth creationist, which is in turn short for "evolution didn't happen, God created everything in 6 days just like the bible says". Everyone knows that, well maybe you really are ignorant of context rather than just intentionally misinterpreting.
And there's only one rant in this thread, and it's not by anyone claiming religious types are wrong.
Words have meanings, but when Young Earth Creationists go 'round calling themselves creationists as loudly as possible, don't be surprised when the definition changes over time from a broad one to a narrow one.
"Gay" used to mean happy. Now in nearly every context, it means homosexual.
When you ignore vernacular use of words in an argument, people tend to laugh and deride you for "arguing semantics" because you're not arguing the point anymore, you're just being an asshole.
Ignore vernacular at your peril.
--
BMO
Have you tried hanging out with some furries? You might at least get the tail part.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Why do I even bother reading these threads in hope of some interesting discussion? The only threads more retarded than evolution/origin of life ones are the ones related to global warming.
They don't meet some of the criteria of the common definition(s) of life.
I know some biologists that don't meet some of the criteria. It's usually in the "reproduction" area where they have problems.
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All right, all right, just hold your goddam horses. First of all, there are D and L amino acids. L, the ones which are "levorotary," or "left handed" are in fact the ones mostly used by eukaryotes, and the ones used as part of our metabolic pathways. However, many D acids are indeed useful to a variety of species, including many prokaryotes, the organisms believed to more greatly resemble the earliest life forms. Calling the product toxic is like calling oxygen caustic: accurate, but misleading. There are certainly more than a few organisms who might be quite happy mucking around in this stuff, which should be enough to push the intelligent biogenesis people in a slightly more sympathetic direction, if not the humans-and-dinosaurs-coexisted counterevolutionists.
No. At least, not the knowledgeable ones.
They'll say something like:
"Stanley Miller's 1952 experiment has been shown to be flawed by more modern views of early Earth. The collection of gases that Miller filled his apparatus with before electrifying it was not characteristic of Earth's early atmosphere. Repeating the experiment with the proper gas mixture as generally accepted by current thinking shows no amino acid generation at all."
And then they'll say something about the right handed amino acids generated, which will destroy life, rather than create it, and the other toxic compounds created during the same experiment, that would have destroyed any chance of the left-handed amino acids forming life, if the acids hadn't been filtered out by the intelligent design of the experiment by the scientist.
And after that, they'll probably question the gases used for this 1958 experiment, assuming that the same mistakes made in 1952 would probably be repeated in 1958.
But then, I'm just guessing, and they may all say "NANANANANOTLISTENING" after all.
"City hall" in German is "Rathaus" Kinda explains a few things......
Your analogy is broken...
This is more like finding worms eating a corpse, and then saying it's proof that the worms must have been there when the person was living.
I can assure you that those samples were intact all these years. Besides, most of the samples were in vials and not in flasks. How do I know this personally? I did my PhD work in a lab right next to Jeffrey Bada's (see the paper, he's one of the main authors). I was there when he found these samples from their storage or something and told us all about it.
Also any amino acids that were in the vials must have been synthesized in the Miller's apparatus since there was no starting materials left in those vials (remember the S.M. were gases). Even so this experiment is still irrelevant to the origin of life for the reasons I've discussed in another comment of mine (see below).
Regardless, this experiment is still irrelevant because those gases Miller used (H2S, H2, NH3, CO2, esp.) cannot coexist in the same place for any appreciable amount of time. Gases like CO2 would not exist without a significant amt of O2, but H2S, H2, NH3, etc (and the amino acid products) would be quickly oxidized at elevated temp in the presence of O2. Moreover, if O2 was absent, unfiltered UV radiation (w/out O2, no O3 layer) would also quickly destroy those reducing gases and amino acid products.
Some were yelling one thing, some another. Most of them had no idea what was going on or why they were there. Acts19:32
The problem with emphasizing science and discounting religion so much is then you have to use science to give supporting evidence for or against your statements. You said, "Religion is entirely a human creation" but you have no evidence of that. You don't take such a hard stance in the rest of your paragraph but it is an indefensible stance to state a categorical negative like "God does not exist" or "Religion is entirely a human creation."
On the other hand, I do have evidence that God exists but whether or not you will accept that evidence depends on your experience with that evidence. For more about what I really mean, read this post: http://www.theeternaluniverse.com/2011/02/everyday-philosophy-epistemological.html
I cannot prove to you that God exists or that religion is not just a creation of humans (many of them certainly are though) but that does not mean that there is not evidence the He exists.
People need to Mod this up.
Creationists (and other ill minded ilk) seem to miss that this was the big revolution not just for abiogenesis. Suddenly organic compounds were in easy reach of inorganic reactions. This was really relevant for both biologists interested in the origin of life, but also people interested in organic chemistry basic research at the time. I was 'introduced' to this experiment twice in college - the first time was in biology, where you'd expect. But the second time was in organic chemistry.
Perhaps this so called 'sludge' is not really sludge at all. I believe that is is actually sauce, sauce from the Flying Spaghetti Monster itself. And being a sauce, this gives us believers in the FSM more actual evidence for its existence, than the magic man in the sky.
Glory to the Flying Spaghetti Monster!
If someone is passing you on the right, you are an asshole for driving in the wrong lane.
Here's the thing about Genesis chapters 1 and 2: they are poetry. It wasn't meant to be a play-by-play description of How We Got Universe. The most obvious clue is the repetition of "And there was evening, and there was morning, the x day." Scholars I am willing to trust because they know Hebrew say that it's still more obvious in its original tongue.
Too many Christians (led by the institution of the church) and also people in general are ignorant of the different kinds of literature found in the Bible. Psalms and Proverbs and Song of Solomon are pretty obviously song, poetry and...well, proverbs; but there is also history, which includes incidents most of us find far-fetched but also accounts with corroborating evidence from other historical documents. There is also apocalyptic literature, the most famous being Revelation. That, too, was never meant to be taken literally but was more of a sort of pep-rally for the Christians of the time to give them encouragement to persevere knowing that they win in the end. St. John may have also eaten some funny mushrooms.
There is a willful ignorance among many American Christians* that doggedly claims "read it literally!" without consideration for the genre within which a particular piece was written and makes those who practice it into fools. There is a willful ignorance among many opponents of Christianity, and religion in general, who do the same thing.
*I will not speak about trends in other countries because I don't have experience with the Christians in them.
Your brain is not a computer.